I’ve been thinking about the issue of population density across the world – and how it varies hugely.

I was reminded of this recently when I discovered that the Philippines is now on Google Street View. Since I had a few spare moments, and because my brother lives in Manila, I went for a little tour around the city, and was struck by the sheer density of it.

As it turns out, Wikipedia and other sources say the city of Manila is the most densely populated on earth, with over 41,000 people per square kilometre. This is followed by another Metro Manila area (Pateros), at over 30,000, and then Dhaka in Bangladesh at over 28,000.

Where am I going with this? Using these figures as a reference point, I decided to see whether the entire population of the world – currently about 7.4bn – could fit in the island of Great Britain. 

The answer is yes. Some maps and a few words below to help explain…

If you scale things a little more closely to the real world, you begin to get a sense of what this kind of density would look like on the ground – and remember that in some parts of the world people do live at these densities.

Just not in the South West of England and time soon, thankfully.

To the other end of the country now, around the far north-east corner of Scotland, including Wick (current population about 7,000). Not much room to breathe here.

In fact, there isn’t much room left for roads or train lines or parks or anything else, so day-to-day life might be just a little complicated. 

There are about 7,400,000,000 people in the world now, according to current best estimates, and the land area of the island of Great Britain is about 210,000 square kilometres. The maps here don’t have lochs and lakes cut out but my calculations do take this into account. 

So, if we had to accommodate the whole world in Great Britain, this gives us a population density of 35,238 people per square kilometre.  Remember, that is a lower density than the City of Manila (that is, the inner part of Manila with a population of 1.7m, rather than the whole of Metro Manila – an area with 13m people).

There is loads of stuff on the internet about this general topic, including the excellent Per Square Mile by Tim De Chant. The most densely populated country is Macau, at just over 21,000 people per square kilometre.

If all this metric stuff is confusing, then I can tell you that in imperial units the density needed to accommodate the world in Great Britain is about 90,000 people per square mile. No matter how you measure it, that’s a lot. Even Manhattan only has 67,000 people per square mile.

The obvious question now of course is what we should do with the rest of the world. Turn it into a park? Nature reserve? Museum?

I’m joking of course: there is also a more serious point here. I’m just trying to put some perspective on the issue of population density across the globe and how we measure it.

It’s tempting to look out the window or use our day-to-day lives to assess what’s ‘normal’; of course, this is natural. But when I’ve been looking more closely at the GHSL global population datasets recently I have been amazed at just how densely populated some cities are – as you can see a little bit from my previous blog post on the topic.

This article was originally posted on Dr Alasdair Rae‘s blog, and is reposted here with the author’s permission.